Senior Software Engineer - Confluent (Workflow tooling)

IBM
IBM

Software Engineering

California, USA · Texas City, TX, USA

Posted on Jun 27, 2026
Introduction

At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You’ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM’s product and technology landscape. Here, you’ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. With Confluent, data doesn’t sit still. We put information in motion, streaming in near real time so organizations can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

Your role and responsibilities

The Cloud Reliability team at Confluent builds the infrastructure and tooling that keeps Confluent Cloud reliable, secure, and operable at scale. We build the systems that human operators and automated tools depend on to act on Confluent's compute environment, query infrastructure state, and automate remediation. Teams across Confluent rely on what we build to investigate incidents, run operational workflows, and enforce security protections across services.

We are looking for engineers with a passion for building and operating large-scale distributed systems in the cloud. This role provides an opportunity to work on complex infrastructure challenges across multiple domains, including distributed coordination, security and access control, workflow orchestration, and observability.

What You Will Do:

  • Design, implement, and maintain highly scalable infrastructure and internal tooling.
  • Engineer core software systems that empower organizational workflows, incident management, and automated troubleshooting.
  • Solve complex distributed systems problems related to coordination, orchestration, and fault tolerance in massive environments.
  • Optimize the availability, monitoring capabilities, and efficiency of mission-critical, Tier-0 services.
  • Enhance system security through robust access management, adherence to least-privilege principles, and comprehensive auditing.
  • Partner with cross-functional engineering teams to increase operational velocity and safety via advanced automation.
Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
  • Deep technical foundation in distributed systems and cloud-scale infrastructure.
  • Proven track record of developing and managing mission-critical, high-availability production environments.
  • Advanced proficiency with Kubernetes and cloud-native architectural patterns.
  • Fluency in Go or similar statically typed languages, with the ability to navigate a polyglot environment.
  • Demonstrated initiative and analytical skills to thrive within a high-velocity organizational culture.
Preferred technical and professional experience
  • Proven expertise across specialized domains, including distributed coordination, security protocols, workflow management, or performance optimization.
  • Hands-on experience developing service-to-service infrastructure utilizing gRPC or service mesh technologies.
  • Technical familiarity with functional programming paradigms, such as Elixir.
  • Track record of building advanced workflow tooling for operational automation, including AI-driven systems.

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence—from machine learning to generative AI—to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge. IBM’s AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM’s hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments—a flexible foundation for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

Are you ready to be an IBMer?

ABOUT IBM

IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.

IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS

Must have the ability to work in Canada without sponsorship.

This role will involve working with technology that is covered by Export Regulations sanctions. If you are a Foreign National from any of the following US sanctioned countries (Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia regions of Ukraine) on a work permit, you are not eligible for employment in this position.

The salary range for the position is based on a full-time schedule. Your ultimate salary within this range may vary depending on your job-related skills and experience for this position.

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